Point of sale (“POS”) terminals enable convenient electronic payment for many products and services. Consumers holding cards associated with a charge, credit, debit, or loyalty account may pay for a purchase simply by entering a card or card information directly into the POS terminal. The demonstrated success of “pay at the pump” terminals is just one example of the popular acceptance of and preference for the convenience of POS terminal transactions. Smart card and contactless card readers provide additional convenience at such POS terminals.
Presently known POS terminals typically include, inter alia, a magnetic stripe reader, a keypad for entry of a personal identification number (“PIN”), and a user display. Conventional POS terminals communicate either directly or indirectly with a central computer to authorize and settle sales transactions. Terminals often include either integrated or peripheral devices such as printers, bar code readers or PIN entry pads.
POS terminals often use Internet Protocol (IP) to connect or communicate with a central computer. When IP POS terminals are being deployed, or develop a problem while in the field, it is very difficult to identify where the problem is in the various points of the communication. The merchant is not knowledgeable in IP infrastructure topology and cannot even begin to tell what is going wrong. All the merchant knows is they cannot accept card payments and the terminal appears to not be working, and therefore, their business is suffering as a result.
Often the distributor of the POS terminal is a financial transaction processor that maintains a ‘help desk’ that merchants may contact when the POS terminal does not function properly. IP POS terminals create a significantly larger call volume to the help desk than conventional POS terminals, and help desk personnel are not trained, nor are they able to diagnose a problem with an IP terminal over the telephone.
Some manufacturers of POS terminals use a ‘PING’ or ‘traceroute’ method of looking for an error point in IP communications. This approach has numerous problems and limitations. Problems with this method include, many firewalls block ICMP echo request messages, which is the protocol used for PING and traceroute. This means this method will not be reliable or even usable in many installations. Secondly, even when this method shows a problem is happening, it does not show where the problem is, nor does it target any specific failure points.
As a result of this situation, in order to make a more attractive product, and provide an improved solution for an IP enabled POS terminal, and to lower the support costs associated with IP POS terminals, a novel and non-obvious IP diagnostics approach for POS terminals is described below.